News:

"There is a terrible desperation to the increasingly pathetic rationalizations from the climate denial camp. This comes as no surprise if you take the long view; every single undone paradigm in history has died kicking and screaming, and our current petroleum paradigm 🐉🦕🦖 is no different. The trick here is trying to figure out how we all make it to the new ⚡ paradigm without dying ☠️ right along with the old one, kicking, screaming or otherwise." - William Rivers Pitt

We have a special thank you for our subscribers this week: a free copy of Corrupted Science:Fraud, Ideology and Politicsin Science[/font]by John Grant, courtesy of publisher See Sharp Press. This must-read new book dives into the sordid history of how corporations and politicians — including the Trump administration — have twisted or attacked scientific expertise. As a subscriber, you can download the e-book in any of these formats: PDF, Mobi (Kindle) or Epub. Enjoy — and thanks for subscribing!

In case you missed it:

Wildfires are on top of our minds right now as California battles its most deadly and destructive wildfire in state history. Wildfire historian Stephen Pyne explains why we need to have different strategies for fighting different kinds ofwildfires 🔥, especially those at the intersection of wildlands and our developed communities.

Posted by: AGelbert

This World War I Battlefield Is a Haunting Reminder of the Environmental Costs ☠️ of War ☠️

By Olivia Rosane

Nov. 12, 2018 12:14PM EST

SNIPPET:

World War I ended 100 years ago on Sunday, but 42,000 acres in northeast France serve as a living memorial to the human and environmental costs of war.

The battle of Verdun was the longest continuous conflict in the Great War, and it so devastated the land it took place on that, after the war, the government cordoned it off-limits to human habitation. What was once farmland became the Zone Rouge ☠️, orRed Zone ☠️, as National Geographic reported.

Posted by: AGelbert

Of all the genetic engineers who have renounced the technology—Arpad Pusztai, Belinda Martineau, Thierry Vrain, John Fagan and Michael Antoniou, among others—because of its shortsighted approach and ability to produce unintended and potentially toxic consequences, Caius Rommens' story may be the most compelling.

Rommens was director of research at Simplot Plant Sciences from 2000 to 2013 where he led development of the company's genetically engineered Innate potato. But over time, Rommens started to have serious doubts about his work and worried about potential health risks from eating the GMO potatoes, which are now sold in 4,000 supermarkets in the U.S.

Rommens' concerns about the GMO potato led him to write a book, Pandora's Potatoes, which was recently published. The book is a case study on how a scientist's initial enthusiasm about genetic engineering turns to doubt and fear as he realizes the hazards the technology can create.

I recently interviewed Caius Rommens about his work developing the GMO potato and the misgivings he now has about it.

The title of your book is Pandora'sPotatoes. What led you to choose this title?

Caius Rommens: During the five years after my departure from Simplot, I realized that I had not been rigorous enough in considering the possibility that my modifications might have caused unintended effects. I then studied the publicly available literature that was relevant to my past work, and identified a number of issues that had been hidden from my view. My GM potatoes had "hidden" issues—like Pandora's Box.

What do you think should be done with these GMO potatoes?

Caius Rommens: I believe that, for the short term, GM potatoes entering the consumer market should be evaluated for the incidence of hidden bruise and infections and the range in levels of toxins such as alpha-aminoadipate and tyramine. 👨‍🔬 🔬 👀

Posted by: AGelbert

This summer I was severely poisoned and made chronically ill by a combination of two factors:

1. Toxic mold

A negligent landlord failed to repair water damage and allowed toxic black mold to grow hidden in the walls and ceiling of an office they owned. Then they rented the office to me.

They knew the mold was there because they periodically came (at night) to patch things up. I had no idea there was a problem and neither did the dozens of people who visited my office over the years.

For five years, my immune system was quietly being chipped away at until it finally collapsed one day "suddenly."

2. "Legal" toxins

Toxic chemicalswere used to put a finish on some cabinets in my home.

Because of my weakened immune system, the fumes from these cabinets had an immediate and catastrophic impact on my health.

I won't go into all the grim details - it would take a book - but I wouldn't wish what's happened to me on my worst enemy.

Getting information about the chemicals used in construction is nearly impossible.

Manufacturers are given all kinds of "outs" and - would you believe it? - they lie.

Here's why this is important:

People with weakened immune systems are often pushed "over the edge" by home renovation work because of the toxic chemicals used.

How many people are impacted this way?

80% of the people who experience a sudden catastrophic collapse of their immune systems have it as the result of home or office renovations.

Have you ever heard of this before?

Probably not.

You or someone you know may be gravely or chronically ill for a "mysterious" reason that the so-called doctors can't figure out. (If they can't write a prescription based on 3 seconds of evaluation they can't figure ANYTHING out.) 🤬

In my case, I was lucky. The impact on me was massive and immediate. There was no doubt I was poisoned by the fumes.

Then I realized I'd been tired and sick-feeling at the end of every work day in my office for years, so, on a hunch, I spent the many hundreds of dollars necessary to have the place tested for mold and the test discovered toxic mold.

Dozens of people had been in and out of my office over the years and no one noticed anything. I sure didn't and I'm usually pretty observant. Then again, the building's owner - a church! - took great pains to keep a lid on the problem.

Mold from shoddy building and maintenance practices and "modern" chemicals are silently destroying the health and lives of millions of people each year.

The multi-billion dollar chemical industry makes sure you NEVER hear about this because their liability would be astronomical.

A source to start your research: Book - "The E.I. Syndrome: An Rx for Environmental Illness" by Sherry Rogers MD.

Posted by: AGelbert

These factory farms produce enough pig waste to fill more than 15,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools each year. And that doesn't even include the 2 million tons of dry waste created by the poultry CAFOs. So where does it all go? Normally, thousands of waste lagoons contain it. That is, until a devastating hurricane hits.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

֍ Following Hurricane Florence, at least 132 CAFO waste lagoons had released pig waste into the environment or were at risk of doing so

֍ It’s estimated that 5,500 pigs and 3.4 million chickens drowned due to Florence flooding

֍ Before-and-after satellite images from the U.S. Geological Survey of a section of North Carolina coastline clearly show massive amounts of brown sludge pouring from inland waterways to the coast

֍ Liquefied pig waste may sicken people and contaminate water with pathogens like salmonella, giardia and E-coli

֍ Hog waste leaching or overflowing into waterways can also lead to algae overgrowth, depleting the water of oxygen and killing fish and other marine life in expansive dead zones

Posted by: AGelbert

Is It Time To Ditch That Loud, Polluting, Hard-To-Start, Smelly, Obnoxious Gas-Powered Weed Whacker❓

September 23rd, 2018 by Steve Bakker

SNIPPET:

Good question. Has the battery-powered device revolution evolved enough to make the gas-fired weed eater an endangered species? Could be. I’m going to share with you the experience I recently had when purchasing a weed eater to whack some seriously overgrown vegetation on my property. Since my past experience with such implements of mass destruction have always been of the gas-powered variety I started pricing just such a beast online. In spite of the fact that I’ve spent quite a bit of time educating myself on advances in Lithium-ion battery tech, converted every battery-powered tool and gizmo in my house to rechargeable batteries, and even have a battery-powered car on order (Tesla Model 3), it didn’t occur to me to think green when buying a weed eater.

Agelbert comment: I have an old Sears electric weed whacker I purchased 20 years ago. It still works fine on a one third acre lot with a LONG extension cord. I never have to worry about batteries to recharge. 😀

I purchased a push lawn mower at the same time. We still use it. 😎

The last time I had a gasoline powered weed whaker was from 1983 - 1986. It was a bad investment.

ALL gasoline powered yard maintenance machines are horribly polluting and should be banned.

Quote

EPA Statistics: Gas Mowers represent 5% of U.S. Air Pollution

Cleaner Air : Gas Mower Pollution Facts

Noisy Noisy Mowers make bad neighbors...Noise Charts

And if that weren't enough...calculate your gas mowers emissions.

FACT: one hour of mowing is the equivalent of driving 350 miles in terms of volatile organic compounds. 😨

Fact: One gas mower spews 87 lbs. of the greenhouse gas CO2, and 54 lbs. of other pollutants into the air every year.

Fact: Over 17 million gallons of gas are spilled each year refueling lawn and garden equipment – more oil than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez. 🤬

Gardeners Spill More than the Exxon Valdezcleaner mowing, the effect of gas powers for one hour

Each weekend, about 54 million Americans mow their lawns, using 800 million gallons of gas per year and producing tons of air pollutants. Garden equipment engines, which have had unregulated emissions until the late 1990's, emit high levels of carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides, producing up to 5% of the nation's air pollution and a good deal more in metropolitan areas.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a new gas powered lawn mower produces volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides emissions air pollution in one hour of operation as 11 new cars each being driven for one hour.

In addition to groundwater contamination, spilled fuel that evaporates into the air and volatile organic compounds ☠️ 🚩 spit out by small engines make smog-forming ozone when cooked by heat and sunlight.

The EPA does NOT admit that electric everything can do all our yard work (AND farm work AND transportation needs) without polluting, but it does say almost the same thing (see below). Of course the Hydrocarbon Loving Hellspawn 😈 will jump in and say that coal power plants are giving us all that electricity (NOT true!), but we know that is a BALONEY excuse to perpetuate the planet killing hydrocarbon "business model".

Posted by: AGelbert

Pressure in a natural gas pipeline that fatally exploded last week in the Boston suburbs was 12 times higher than what "the system intended to hold," Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren said in a letter to the pipeline's parent company Tuesday.

The explosion, the largest natural gas pipeline accident in the US since 2010, killed an 18-year-old, injured at least 25, damaged dozens of homes and forced more than 8,000 people to evacuate.

The senators are seeking answers to 19 questions about the explosion, while residents of the three impacted towns filed a class-action lawsuit Tuesday against Columbia Gas and its parent company NiSource.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: This is Dimitri Lascaris, reporting for The Real News Network from Montreal, Canada.

Today we look at Hurricane Florence and two important issues that relate to this major event. One is the media’s coverage of the ties between climate change and hurricanes. Another is a story that demands media attention, how hurricane-caused spills from coal ash pits and hog manure ponds in North Carolina, which is in the path of the hurricane, could harm low income People of Color. Our guest is longtime climate journalist, Lisa Hymas, director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters and senior editor at Grist. She joins us from Washington, D.C. Thank you for joining us today, Lisa.

LISA HYMAS: Thank you for having me. Happy to be with you.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: So, Lisa, let’s start with something Media Matters and Public Citizen reported on last year. They found that major outlets dropped the ball while covering hurricanes. They often did not connect them to climate change, and after Hurricane Harvey, a devastating hurricane, two groups of scientists published studies that link the record breaking rainfall to climate change. Now scientists are warning of a similar pattern of rainfall and effects from climate change, and last year, your reporting revealed that the media’s lack of coverage on this connection was quite significant. Thus far in your view, have the media done a better job of covering Florence and its to global warming?

LISA HYMAS: Well, it’s been a mixed bag so far. I mean, you are definitely right that coverage last year was very poor, coverage that connected the devastating hurricanes that we saw to climate change. So, we here at Media Matters did an analysis of broadcast news coverage of Hurricane Harvey and found that both the ABC and NBC never once mentioned climate change in all of their coverage of Hurricane Harvey. And we found that they didn’t do much better on Irma or Maria either. And as you said, Public Citizen is another organization that has done some analysis on this, and they looked at TV coverage and radio and newspapers last year, major newspapers, and found that just four percent of the stories about last year’s hurricanes mentioned climate change.

So, that is much less coverage than this issue deserves. I mean, not every story about a hurricane needs to mention climate change, but we should be seeing a lot more explanation to Americans of the ways that climate change exacerbates hurricanes and makes them more dangerous. So, this year so far, we have seen some good coverage explaining how climate change is making hurricanes worse, and even making Hurricane Florence in particular worse. So, I’ve been encouraged by some of the coverage that I’ve seen in outlets like The Washington Post, but also some regional newspapers like The Baltimore Sun and The Miami Herald have been explaining this connection.

On the other hand, we’ve seen some bad work in this area. Particularly, I’ve been looking at what USA Today has been doing. So, the paper USA Today ran a decent editorial this week talking about the connections between climate change and hurricanes, but then they ran a couple of pieces on their editorial page that disputed the link. And one of one of them outright denied that climate science is a settled thing. And another piece that they published was by a known climate denier who argued, contrary to the science, that we can’t see any influence of climate change on hurricanes. So, I’m optimistic by the good coverage that I’m seeing, but we still have a ways to go.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: And you mentioned The Washington Post was one of the more responsible media outlets. Do you know how the readership of The Washington Post compares to USA Today? I would imagine that USA Today has a substantially larger readership. Is that fair?

LISA HYMAS: You know, I believe you’re right but I’m not actually sure.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Okay. Now let’s move on to the recently loosened rule on coal ash disposal. This was the first Obama-era EPA rule changed by new incoming acting head of the EPA Andrew Wheeler. This move saves power companies like Duke Energy in North Carolina millions of dollars. But as Duke University’s Avner Vengosh observed in terms of the environmental impacts of coal ash, scaling back requirements in particular could leave communities vulnerable to potential pollution. And he said, “We have clear evidence that coal ash ponds are leaking into groundwater sources.

The question is, has it reached areas where people use it for drinking water? We just don’t know. That’s the problem.” How do you assess this problem, and is there anywhere in the country where sufficient groundwater testing is taking place?

LISA HYMAS: That’s a good question. I mean, we’re really concerned and a lot of people are concerned right now about these coal ash pits in North Carolina in the path of the storm. Coal burning power plants create massive amounts of toxic waste and they’re stored oftentimes alongside rivers and waterways in these pits, or sometimes they’re called ponds, that oftentimes aren’t properly lined, they’re not properly covered. Even when there isn’t bad whether, they can leak into waterways. So, there’s a lot of worry right now that if there is substantial flooding, major winds, that could really contaminate water supplies.

I mean, one of the real problems here is that that is likely to hurt low-income folks the most. They’re the ones who tend to live near power plants. They don’t put power plants in rich neighborhoods, they tend to be located near low-income people and minority communities. And so, the media and public health officials definitely need to be watching whether there are spills that will affect drinking water supplies.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: And I understand another important aspect of this that you have been imploring the media to cover is hog farms and their impact on low-income communities of color in North Carolina. While some of the print press seem to be on top of one aspect of the story namely, the dangers of hog waste getting into local waterways, you bring up a part that they are missing, which could potentially have profound impacts on the type of pollution on People of Color, and also, the role of the Trump administration loosening of regulations that could make these spills more likely.

North Carolina is home to thirty-one coal ash pits that house around, as I understand it, one hundred and eleven million tons, a stunning amount, of toxic waste produced by hogs. These ponds store about ten billion pounds of waste. Now, with the heavy rain from Hurricane Florence, this creates, as you call, it a “noxious witch’s brew that might be headed into people’s homes and drinking water. Please elaborate a little bit about the nature of this threat and whether you think enough is being done both to deal with the threat and to cover the threats, to make the public aware of the threat.

LISA HYMAS: Yeah, so you’re are exactly right. I’ve been glad to see that some outlets in the past few days have written about the danger of spills from hog manure waste pits as well as coal ash pits, but none of them have been picking up on the environmental justice angle and the people who will be hurt the most by this. Just as power plants tend to be located by low-income and minority communities, so do hog facilities.

So, North Carolina is home to many, many industrial hog facilities. You might call them factory farms, or the industry calls them concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs, but factory farms pretty much captures it. So, you have huge numbers of hogs in small confined spaces, and they produce massive amounts of waste. And that waste is, again, like the coal ash, oftentimes stored in pits that aren’t properly protected, that can overflow near waterways. And that waste is really noxious stuff that could have serious impacts on water quality.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: As most of the nation’s scientific community has expressed, extreme weather patterns appear to be on the rise. And as California’s governor Jerry Brown discusses, his state’s devastating wildfires are the new normal. North Carolina appears to have seen it a little differently in 2012, when the GOP-controlled state legislative body passed a law banning state officials from considering the latest science regarding sea level rise when doing coastal planning. The law was drafted in response to an estimate by the state’s Coastal Resources Commission that sea level will rise by thirty-nine inches in the next century, prompting fears of costly were home insurance and alarm from many quarters.

But residents and developers in the state’s coastal Outer Banks region pushed the bill, signed by a Republican Governor, saying, “if science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal.” I’m sorry, that actually was a comment by Stephen Colbert, not by the Republican governor. However, as you write, the problem is not solved. Will Hurricane Florence and the pro-environmental Democrat Roy Cooper, who was elected governor in 2016, in your view, be able to mute the influence of developers and Republican majority legislature in that state? How does this become something that we solve in North Carolina given the political realities?

LISA HYMAS: I think it’s going to be a challenge. I mean, you’re right to contrast California, which is really pushing ahead and trying to prepare for climate change and trying to fight climate change, with a state like North Carolina, where they really have been trying to move backward and pretend that climate science doesn’t even exist. I’ll be curious to see whether Hurricane Florence has some influence on that. When people’s homes are damaged or destroyed and their lives are affected and their communities are hurt, sometimes they can get a new view on things and maybe come to realize that climate change isn’t just an idle threat, but it’s something that’s already happening right now to communities.

So, I am hopeful that North Carolina can start moving in a more realistic direction, both preparing for climate change and fighting it, but we we will have to see. They don’t have a great record so far.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Well, we’ve been speaking to Lisa Hymas about Hurricane Florence, the media’s coverage of this major weather event and its connection to climate change, and the political rallies in North Carolina. Thank you very much for joining us today, Lisa.

LISA HYMAS: Thank you for having me on, it’s been great to talk to you.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: And this is Dimitri Lascaris, reporting for The Real News.

Posted by: AGelbert

Germany was supposed to be a model for solving global warming. In 2007, the country’s government announced that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the year 2020. This was the kind of bold, aggressive climate goal scientists said was needed in all developed countries. If Germany could do it, it would prove the target possible.

So far, Germany has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 27.7 percent—an astonishing achievement for a developed country with a highly developed manufacturing sector. But with a little over a year left to go, despite dedicating $580 billion toward a low-carbon energy system, the country “is likely to fall short of its goals for reducing harmful carbon-dioxide emissions,” Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday. And the reason for that may come down not to any elaborate solar industry plans, but something much simpler: cars.

“At the time they set their goals, they were very ambitious,” Patricia Espinosa, the United Nations’ top climate change official, told Bloomberg. “What happened was that the industry🦕🦖—particularly the car industry 😈🐉🦕🦖—didn’t come along.”

Changing the way we power our homes and businesses is certainly important. But as Germany’s shortfall shows, the only way to achieve these necessary, aggressive emissions reductions to combat global warming is to overhaul the gas-powered automobile and the culture that surrounds it. The only question left is how to do it.

In 2010, a NASA study declared that automobiles were officially the largest net contributor of climate change pollution in the world.

Posted by: AGelbert

Baltimore, Milwaukee, Chicago and Cleveland all have been victim to high lead and other toxins in the water. Eddie Conway and Eugene Puryear discuss the frustrations of citizens and the struggles to get clean water in communities of color

They buzz and swarm, hover and dart. In the process of gathering pollen and nectar for their hives, bees and other insects pollinate flowers, ensuring that plants reproduce and yield fruit and other products. They contribute to pollinating nearly 75% of all human food crops worldwide, and yet humans have put tremendous stress on insect pollinator habitats with pesticides, land development, altered hydrologic patterns, and other actions. As a result, insect species have declined significantly. Ultimate loss of these insect species could have global scale impacts — wiping out crops, elevating food production costs, and compromising human nutrition.

Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, however, are investigating ways to use pollinator-friendly solar power as a way to reinvigorate pollinator habitats. By studying solar energy facilities with pollinator habitats on site, researchers hope to rehabilitate pollinator populations that play a crucial role in national and global agricultural industries, plant species, and thriving pollinator numbers.

pollinator habitat

Concerns regarding the conservation of pollinators have risen to the global scale as countries have seen severe pollinator declines and have begun developing strategies to sustain pollinator species in the face of an ever-expanding human population. Although the total land area projected to be required for solar development through 2030 is less than 0.1% of the contiguous US surface area, a need exists to improve the landscape sustainability of large-scale solar developments to avoid or minimize potential impacts to local agriculture and cultural, ecological, and other natural resources.

With goals to conserve habitat, maintain ecosystem function, and support multiple ongoing human land uses in the landscape, researchers in Argonne’s Environmental Science (EVS) division have found that the area around solar panels could provide an ideal location for the plants that attract pollinators. This study outlines opportunities for investigating the environmental benefits of pollinator habitats, such as water conservation, land management, and carbon dioxide reduction.

pollinator habitat

Background about Rural Energy Development and Agricultural Intensification

Utility-scale solar energy (USSE) developments (≥1 megawatt [MW]) are increasing in agricultural landscapes, specifically on former agricultural fields. Driven variously by economics, rejection of fossil fuels, global climate change actions, air and water pollution, and energy security, USSE grew at an average rate of 72% per year between 2010 and 2016. By the end of 2016, USSE facilities accounted for approximately 22 GW of installed US electricity generation capacity, with an additional 13 GW of planned USSE construction. Interest in on-site vegetation management approaches to USSE farms is increasing, as it could restore ecosystem balance such as crop pollination that also maintains or even enhances agricultural production on nearby lands.

Recent emphasis has been placed on the creation and maintenance of pollinator habitats at USSE facilities. “Pollinator habitats” describes the practice of planting seed mixes of regional native plants such as milkweed and other wildflowers, within the solar infrastructure footprint after construction. Sowing could occur among solar panels or other reflective surfaces, or in off-site areas adjacent to the solar facility. Sowing has the intent to attract and support native insect pollinators by providing food sources, refuge, and nesting habitat.

Despite their ecological differences, all types of solar-pollinator habitats have the potential to improve biodiversity and ecosystem functionas compared to conventional USSE vegetation management practices.

Conventional USSE management practices are intended to minimize or prohibit the growth of vegetation within the facility footprint:

• placement of gravel

• establishment and maintenance of turf grass

• mowing

• herbicide application

Such practices provide little or no habitat suitable for pollinator species, especially if these vegetation management practices occur frequently during operation of the solar facility.

In response to the population decline of pollinating insects, such as wild bees and monarch butterflies, the Argonne researchers have examined the potential benefits of establishing pollinator habitats at USSE facilities to conserve pollinators and restore the ecosystem they provide. Examining over 2,800 existing and planned USSE facilities in the contiguous US, the researchers determined whether solar-sited pollinator habitat could benefit agriculture. They found over 3,500 square kilometers of agricultural land near existing and planned USSE facilities that could benefit from rehabilitation and which could help reinstate the declining pollinator population with few subsequent side effects.

For example, one team looked at 3 example crop types to measure the agricultural benefits of increased pollinator habitats. These crops – soybeans, almonds, and cranberries – depend on insect pollinators for their annual crop yields. If all existing and planned solar facilities near these crop types included pollinator habitat and increased yield by just 1%, crop values could rise $1.75 million, $4 million, and $233,000 for soybeans, almonds and cranberries, respectively.

Solar-sited pollinator habitats can help optimize the land-use efficiency of solar energy developments while not compromising solar panel efficiency. Often filled with gravel or turf grass, much of the land in a solar farm is untended. Research has shown that in many locations these grounds offer an ideal place to establish native plant species, such as prairie grass or wildflowers, which are prevalent pollinator habitats and can encourage steady insect population growth. There are economic benefits to pollinators, too — honey bee pollination alone adds more than $15 billion in value to agricultural crops each year in the US.

By increasing the ability of pollinators to pollinate adjacent agricultural fields, solar-sited pollinator habitat may boost farmers’ crop yields and create companion income revenues to neighboring agricultural farms. Rejuvenating local pollinator habitat is one way that local farmers can augment trends to lease land for solar arrays, as the practice has proven more lucrative to them at times than cash crops.

Most UK sites studied point out that herbicide application to date at USSEs has been limited to spot treatment of weeds. They conclude that a reduction in the use of broad-spectrum herbicides will lead to greater diversity of broadleaved plants. High soil fertility of arable farmland favors a few dominant species of plants, but, as soil fertility reduces in the absence of fertilizer, diversity of both grasses and broad leaved plants is able to and is anticipated to increase. Where suitable USSE management exists, botanical diversity increases over time, with plants emerging from seed banks as well as airborne or animal-carried seed.

The symbiosis of solar farms and pollinator habitats may widen appreciation among community members and local governments for the pollinators’ role in agricultural production. It may persuade solar developers to rethink the landscape design around their installations.

Many US states are catching up to their European counterparts and acknowledging the need to address pollinator population declines through legislation. Solar facilities are beginning to respond by sowing in pollinator-friendly areas. Illinois recently passed a “Pollinator-Friendly Solar Energy Bill” in May, 2018. Other states like Maryland and Minnesota have made part of their legislative agendas to transition to USSEs that incorporate landscape compatible environs.

Photos on Foter.com and solartradeassociation on Trend Hype / CC BY-SA and USDAgov on TrendHype / CC BY-ND and by oatsy40 on Trend hype / CC BY

Agelbert COMMENT: There is a destructive mentallity in much of the USA in regard to vegetation in general and lawns in particular. This attitude has influenced most of the non-indigenous population for centuries.

What am I talking about❓ I'm talking about the destructive practice of maintaining manicured lawns. The Zoning Nazis in most towns in the USA prohibit home owners form growing food in their front yards or even allowing the yard to be "wild" with wild flowers or other local vegetation. 👎

All this adds pollution from gasoline powered lawn mowers (which pollute massively because those small engines have no pollution controls whatsoever!) AND poisons the soil with (hydrocarbon feed stock) chemical pesticides and herbicides. 👎👎👎

Where did this unhealthy practice come from⁉️

It came from the Midieval Castle use of "Killing fields".

Look at this picture:

We are all very familiar with the concept of a moat. BUT, most castles did not have one.

The castles were subject to attack, so the grounds around the walls were cleared so attacking troops could not use tall foliage as cover to get near the walls. These areas were called "killling fileds" because the archers on the walls would kill anyone attacking the castle in the cleared areas.

When peace was more routine, castle grounds went from large manicured (i.e. short) lawns to manicured bushes and fastidiously ordered flower gardens with mazes and walks for the "nobles" to stroll along in a 100% "tamed" nature area.

This Victorian idea of ordering natue obsessively was, unfortunately, transferred to the "new" world along with the genocide of the native population. 🤬

It's time to stop being stupid with lawns, people. We do not need a killing field (for people AND bees, butterflies, ladybugs, worms, beetles, trillions of soil health providing microbes, etc.) in our front yard.

📢 Vote the Zoning Nazis OUT in your town!

We DO need to take seriously our RESPONSIBILITY as stewards of the biosphere to work to promote and preserve biodiversity, as Carolyn Fortuna 👍🌞 advocates here.

Thank you, Carolyn Fortuna 🍃, for being part of the solution. 💐 God bless you.

Posted by: AGelbert

Jury Finds Monsanto liable in the first Roundup cancer trial – here’s what could happen next

LAST UPDATED ON AUGUST 13TH, 2018 AT 6:35 PM BY CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR

SNIPPET:

Much of the plaintiff’s case was based on a widely criticized 2015 statement by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, that glyphosate was a “probable human carcinogen” (Group 2A on its scale). A classification of “human carcinogen” (Group 1) means that a panel of scientists convened by the IARC believes the agent is a cancer hazard to humans, like smoking and ionizing radiation. The 2A classification is not as strong. It means that there is credible evidence, but it does not reach the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The IARC’s process for determining carcinogenicity has come under heavy criticism before. In particular, in the early 2000s some observers worried that industry was actually influencing the agency to downgrade its classification of chemical agents. In the Roundup cases, the accusation against the IARC cuts the other way. According to some accounts, it was biased against industry and sought a harsh classification for glyphosate.

The IARC has provided a detailed defense of its process in the glyphosate evaluation. It has also published a monograph on glyphosate with all the gory details of the science behind its evaluation.

I served on a monograph working group in 2007 for an IARC assessment of whether shift work was a potential cancer hazard. I have also participated in three other meetings sponsored by IARC over the years, so I have seen the agency’s process up close. In my view, IARC personnel go to great lengths to ensure objectivity and scientific rigor.

This does not mean that their classifications are the last word. In fact, the agency has often changed its classification of an agent based on new evidence after initial evaluation. Sometimes it has become more certain that the agent poses a hazard, but in other cases it has downgraded the hazard.

Agelbert NOTE: I'll save you some time. Monsanto 👹 is lying about not having tested glyphosate to detertmine whether or not it is a Carcinogen. They 🔬 have AND they know the EXACT concentrations that produce the Carcinogenic results in test animals, but they 👹 have made very sure that it cannot be proven in court.

But, that's not where THAT skullduggery ends, not by a long shot. Monsanto 👹 uses the old reliable Tobacco Propaganda Mense Rea Modus Operandi (SEE BELOW) to obfuscate/prevent any attempt at attempt to present evidence of glyphosate carcinogenicity by honest third parties👨‍🔬🔬 that tested glyphosate.

Monsanto will do everything possible to avoid paying the amount determined by the court BECAUSE, if they pay (as they would if they had any ethics whatsoever!), the floodgates will be open to destroying their "doubt is our product" multi-decade stall/scam which has poisoned millions of people and animals surreptitiously.

So, in order to continue profiting from the crime and NOT paying the fine or doing the time,Monsanto 😈 will take this all the way to the Supreme Fascists Court , where the "award" will be reduced to a pittance or overturned.

Posted by: AGelbert

The objective of this first video is to explain what this new Food Safety Modernization act means to YOU. While there was a lot of information provided, in just a few short minutes, we’ve provided a summary and key take-aways after the video.

The FDA has created new legislation to ensure that consumers and animals are protected from the unnecessary risks they’ve become exposed to over the last decade. Every part of the supply chain is now accountable for ensuring that the food arrives, from farm to table, in a manner that is fit for consumption.

Transportation companies will now be required to have documented plans and objectives that demonstrate they have a plan in place that is being followed, to comply with the new guidelines.

The next video will explain how the 7th rule mentioned earlier, the Sanitary transportation of human and animal food (STHAF) directly impacts fleets and outline what you need to know.

Posted by: AGelbert

A new study has unveiled humanity's sweeping impact on the world's oceans. Commercial fishing, climate change, agricultural runoff and other human-caused stressors have wiped out nearly 90 percent of Earth's marine wilderness, researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Queensland, Australia revealed.

Just 13 percent of the world's seas can be classified as truly wild, with most being located in the high seas, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

"Those marine areas that can be considered 'pristine' are becoming increasingly rare, as fishing and shipping fleets expand their reach across almost all of the world's oceans, and sediment runoff smothers many coastal areas," said Kendall Jones, researcher at the University of Queensland and lead author of the paper, in a press release.

What's more, less than 5 percent of the world's remaining marine wildness is protected.

"Improvements in shipping technology mean that even the most remote wilderness areas may come under threat in the future, including once ice-covered places that are now accessible because of climate change," Jones said.

To map out these areas, the research team used fine scale global data to analyze 19 human stressors on the seas, including industrial shipping, sediment runoff and several types of fishing.

The areas that were least affected by these stressors were classified as wilderness, amounting to 21 million square miles or 13.2 percent of the marine environment.

The study shows that most marine wilderness is located in the Arctic, Antarctic and in remote Pacific island nations with low human populations. Conversely, in coastal regions with intense human activities, very little marine wilderness remains. These coastal habitats are home to coral reefs, salt marshes and kelp forests.

The researchers said that preserving the ocean's remaining wilderness is more urgent than ever.

"We know these marine wilderness areas are declining catastrophically, and protecting them must become a focus of multilateral environmental agreements," James Watson, professor at the University of Queensland, director of science at the Wildlife Conservation Society and senior author of the paper, said in the press release. "If not, they will likely disappear within 50 years."

• In the U.S., there are about 80,000 registered chemicals. Of these, only a few hundred have been tested for safety, and even that testing is considered inadequate by most toxicologists

• Chemicals are tested in isolation. In real world application however, chemicals are used in combination, and the few studies done on synergetic effects reveal even nontoxic chemicals can become toxic when mixed together

• The agricultural and global chemical industries have manipulated the system to control and suppress safety concerns. Through regulatory capture, regulators end up working for the industry’s rather than the public’s interest

• Regulators make decisions on the safety of poisons in our food and environment based on data provided by the company selling the toxin, and outsiders cannot review that evidence

• There’s no specific safety testing done for children, but studies show there is no lower level of pesticides that is safe for children

Agelbert NOTE: The second half of the second video deals with some facts about healthy soils everytone should know. In the earlier part of that video I learned that children DO NOT have certain enzymes in the liver, that human adults DO have, that are extremely important.

SNIPPET 2:

Quote

"There’s no specific testing done for children,” he says. “There’s absolutely no published scientific evidence to show any level of safety. On the other hand, studies show there is no lower level that is safe for children.

Children, when we talk about the unborn, the newborn and grown children up to puberty, they do not have the detoxification enzymes in their livers that we have as adults. Particularly for young children, that means they have no way of detoxifying even the smallest amount of a pesticide or a chemical.

The evidence shows that even small amounts, when children are exposed in the womb, through breastfeeding or at a young age, it severely affects the way they develop. It affects the nervous system, the hormone system and the reproductive system.

When you look at the science, there are so many areas that can be negatively affected by these small amounts. Unfortunately, a lot of these effects last a lifetime. And also, we know some are intergenerational. Those children's grandchildren will be affected."

Posted by: AGelbert

Agelbert NOTE: This is a great article packed with cartoons revealing the battle going in in Germany between Renewable Energy advocates and hydrocarbon addicts refusing to recognize the dangers in Greenhouse Gas fueled Catastrophic Climate Change:

July 18, 2018

Germany's coal mines seen from space, the talk on electric cars and Chinese-German battery production cooperation - CLEW's visiting cartoonist Mwelwa Musonko presents his view of the Energiewende and its many big and small peculiarities.

The world’s biggest emitter decided to take some serious climate action – and in the process renewed our hope that we will beat the climate crisis.

Ten years ago, the idea that China – the planet’s single biggest carbon polluter – would be a global leader on climate in 2018 would have sounded, well, a stretch.

But with terrifying levels of air pollution threatening to spark social unrests in earlier years and the US stepping back from the global stage under President Trump, that’s exactly what’s happened.

The story begins with a massive public health crisis, but how China responded – and five steps in particular – lays out a practical path to a low-carbon future for countries around the world.

Airpocalypse Now ☠️

How did the world’s biggest polluter become the world’s leader on climate?

It all goes back to the “Airpocalypse.”

Not too long ago, many in some of the Chinese cities were going about their business engulfed in a cloud of pollution. The gray haze could be so dense, that buildings and trees would quite literally disappear in front of your eyes. And stepping outside, even for just a minute, required wearing a facial mask to avoid directly breathing the toxic air.

How to Keep Climate Action on Track After the Paris Agreement

The source of much of that pollution wasn’t hard to find either: coal-fired power plants and vehicles on the road. Since the early 2000s, China’s economy had been growing rapidly, powered largely by coal.

The unchecked use of coal on such a huge scale didn’t take long to generate real problems. In 2005, China surpassed the United States to become the world’s biggest CO2 emitter (a title that the country has held since the 20th century). And in 2008, 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the entire world were in China, according to the World Bank.

Enough Is Enough

In 2013, the Chinese government finally decided that enough was enough, introducing a national action plan to curb air pollution, including a set of coal consumption limits for key regions including Beijing and the Pearl River Delta.

In 2016, China released its national plan for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and committed to lowering the country’s carbon intensity of GDP by 60–65 percent (below 2005 levels) by 2030 in its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to Paris Agreement. As the world’s second-largest economy – and home to nearly 1.4 billion people – that’s a big deal to the world.

Growing Pains and Growing Progress

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Emissions are still rising as the country continues to grow. And although China has halt many coal projects over the past years, environmentalists have called it out for investing coal energy in other countries such as Turkey and Pakistan to satisfy its immense need for energy.

On the other hand, China has made real progress. Between 2013 and 2017, Chinese cities cut the amount of fine pollution particulates(PM2.5) in the air by an average of 32 percent. And the capital Beijing has seen a lot more sunny days as PM 2.5 concentration dropped 54 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017, in comparison to the same period of 2016.

On a global level, there’s also good news. China has been instrumental in keeping the Paris Agreement process going, continuing to curb emissions and expand renewables even as the US (another huge polluter) has dramatically backed down at the federal level.

So how’s China done it? There’ve been many steps, but five have been especially key.1. Bye-Bye, Coal

China has been slowly (but surely) moving away from coal energy. Last year, the government announced plans to cancel 103 new plants and closed the very last coal plant located in the capital, Beijing.

From 2014 to 2015, coal consumption reduced after a decade of steady increase.2. Putting a Price on Carbon

One of China’s most impressive moves was to launch the world’s largest national carbon trading market in 2017. The goal is to encourage companies to become greener by allowing them sell or buy excessive carbon emissions. The first phase of the project only covers the power generation sector, but the initiative is expected to expand across many other areas of the economy.

3. Clean Bus Rides

China is showing the world how to move many people around quickly and cleanly. Around 17 percent of the country’s municipal buses are electric, and the city Shenzhen holds the record for the globe’s largest electric bus fleet, with all of its 16,359 buses had gone electric last year. The achievement was only possible due to government subsidies. But in the long run, operation and maintenance costs of electric buses are significantly lower than those fueled by diesel.

4. Making the Investment in Renewables

Moving away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy is not just an effective way to clean up the planet. It’s also a good investment.

In 2017, China invested a staggering US$ 126.6 billion in renewable energy – 45 percent of the total worldwide investment. The country has been using a whole lot of green technology internally – nearly doubled its solar generation from 2016 to 2017. But it also has its eyes on a much larger international market.

5. New Forests

China is so keen on green that it’s deploying soldiers to plant trees across the country. The goal is to replant many of the forests that were cut down for industrialization and farmland, all with an eye to removing carbon from the atmosphere on a massive scale and doing it naturally.

Sowing seeds is actually one of the country’s Paris Agreement goals – China wants to increase forest stock volume by 4.5 billion cubic meters by 2030, from its 2005 level. China is also planting a different kind of forest on its buildings to help sequester carbon.

The Takeaway

The catalyst was the sight of millions choking on industrial and power sector pollution, but the result has been one of the most influential for emissions reduction and energy transformation the world’s ever seen.

Five steps in the process have been critical:

Cutting coal

Putting a price on carbon

Cleaning up public transit

Investing in renewables

Conserve and rebuild the forest

The good news is that it doesn’t take a public health crisis for countries to embrace these and other practical solutions. The world’s second-largest economy has already shown they work, and now it’s time for other nations to follow its lead.

Want to stay updated on climate action across the globe? Join our email activist list. We’ll deliver the latest on climate science and innovative ways you can get involved in the climate movement right to your inbox.

Posted by: AGelbert

TAE (The Automatic Earth web site is the home of fracked gas cheerleader "energy expert" Nicole Foss 🦖)

Waste Based Society:Solutions andAlternatives

Published June 12, 2012

Quote

Are there viable solutions and alternatives to the Energy intensive Waste Based Society we currently live in, which do not entail a return to Paleolithic levels of technology? Diner and TAE Commentariat member A. G. Gelbert outlines a myriad of technologies which might be employed to maintain a higher technological base for society.

RE

Solutions and Alternatives to the Waste Based Society

by A. G. Gelbert

We are cursed with a rather effective propaganda machine that defends the status quo and works mightily to provide allegedly iron clad arguments exposing our desperate dependence on fossil fuels and the enormous debt we owe to them for our ‘wonderful civilization’. The media has cleverly weaved fact and fiction to present plausible arguments against the practicality of going cold turkey on fossil fuels and 100% on renewables.

Not one word about the fact that fossil fuels are easy to meter and conveniently provide a constant revenue stream for the rich along with governmental control of a populace that simply cannot move or function without daily use of fossil fuels ever seems to be mentioned. Not one word about how renewables cannot be metered or taxed easily and how that feature gives everyone a large degree of independence aand flexibility in disaster situations to help themselves or a less fortunate neighbor is mentioned.

On the other hand, the continuous and vociferous denial of the link between fossil fuels and environmental problems, regardless of scientific concensus on this very real link, never seems to go away either. The actual history of the industrial revolution involving some very brutal measures to coerce humans to abandon horses, as only one of many coercive measures, for tranportation and farming are always ignored and replaced with a stream of pejorative comments about horse dung in big cities. People did not want to get rid of their horses!

I am not simply talking about city ordinances and fines targeting horses. Right around 1865 a big push began to sell farm machinery. Amazingly, a huge horse plague hit the U.S. that year that killed a massive amount of horses. No explanation beyond “Civil War stress” blarney was ever given. These horses were not just city horses in population centers but out in the country as well.

The move to horseless carriages began on the farm with steam power and hydrocarbon lubricants. The automobile came later along with the bone cancer. Bone cancer from the original automoblie fuel, benzene, is seldom mentioned by the media and apparently is considered no big deal in comparison to horseshit odor. Moving on to the early 20th century, Rockefeller has a waste product in his refinery cracking towers (after separating all those great heavy and light lubricants) called gasolene and he talks Henry Ford into modifying the carburators to run on it.

Of course the ‘minor’ problem with benzene fuel may have helped make the switch. There were electric cars on the road at the time. Cleveland had wind generators creating electricity at that time! You’ll never guess what happened to them and the electric trolleys all over many towns in the USA. So, enough of that. Everyone here knows how predatory capitalism attempts to game the system to achieve price control and a monopoly. Once much more efficient and sustainable technologies are shoved aside by hook or by crook, the distorted and mendacious meme that our current technology is the result of friendly capitalist competition in the ‘free market’ is pushed.

Predation occurs followed by propaganda versions of history. That is the real history of the industrial revolution in regard to our choices of energy production. Renewables got squeezed out, not because they couldn’t compete favorably, but because the pollution and health costs of fossil fuels got ‘externalized’. Along the way, the independence of the mostly agrarian American in energy production and use was crushed.

A love afffair with the car was fostered to the point that in the late 1920’s more Americans had cars than flush toilets. Of course they were better off, ecologically speaking, without flush toilets, but the point is the job of selling Americans on fossil fuels was a done deal by that time.

So please remember that nobody was doing us any favors, like the media wants to claim; they were selling us something in order to concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. They were using us as a cash cow to the point of introducing planned obsolecence, rampant consumerism to keep the factories going and simultaneously thwarting moves to sustainability like Henry Ford’s plan to make cars out of hemp plastic in the early1940s.

We like new stuff and are always looking for the latest model year of the car or whatever because we have been manipulated by experts to do so. It has absolutely nothing to do with our health, well being or happiness. Bernays really messed us up. Fast forward to the present where the witches brew of ecological harm brought about by industrialization has caught up with us. And NOW, all of a sudden, we just can’t live without all this ‘wonderful’ energy packed fossil fuel economy.

Methinks somebody wants to slap a guilt trip on the chumps so they agree to clean up the mess even though the media keeps claiming there isn’t really that much of a mess. We, the masses, are accused of being wasteful pigs that bred like rats thanks to fossil fuels.

Where to begin? How about the fact that family size has been decreasing, not increasing, througout the industrial revolution? That’s right. The numbers were baked in by 1800 and the wars slowed them down a bit. Louis Pasteur and Lister did a hell of a lot more to create our present population ‘problem’ than fossil fuels. Most of the key scientific advancements in medicine were not exactly high tech and fossil fuel dependent. A human makes it past 5 years of age and he has a huge chance of living out his 3 score and ten. It was the enormous reduction in infant mortality brought about by antiseptic procedures that caused the population explosion, not fossil fuels. It’s a stretch to say that fossil fuels alowed people to obtain clean water to wash their hands before delivering a baby, but I’m sure the media verbal contortionists would toss it out there to further muddy the waters of historical truth.

The much touted plumbing advancements that require machinery and factories powered by fossil fuels, while they did reduce disease in population centers and prolonged life, were setting us up for more fossil fuel use through improper humanure handling. I maintain that the main cause of our population explosion is knowledge of disease microbes, their propagation methods and our changes in hygiene as a result.

Edward Bernays

What about all this waste we now produce that we have been folded, spindled and mentally mutilated through Freud’s nephew Wall Street amygdala reptilian brain control propaganda? They set us up and now WE are the bad guys? They want us to shop till we drop and WE are the problem? And how much ‘waste’ do WE actually produce on a carbon footprint basis compared to the global 1%?

Well, Senator Bernie Sanders stated recently that less than 1% of the U.S. owns about 40% of the assets (I’m not talking about income increases although they have gotten the lion’s share over the last ten years as well). Yes, I know he talks about banks too but he mentions those 400 or so elite families every now and then. Now figure the carbon footprint of those people and compare it with the rest of us. All those endless films about diapers, milk gallons and so on used in our middle class lifetimes with the obligatory landfill mountains thrown in are nothing compared with the horrendous and gigantic amount of crap these families generate. Isn’t it amazing that when it comes to pollution and wasteful habits, we are ‘all in this together’? No attempt is made to segregate out the worst offenders. On the contrary, the poor and middle class are constantly demonized as being irresponsible useless eaters. It’s all quite Orwellian on the part of the media.

But yeah, we do waste, and we have a waste problem that is real, so let’s talk about it.

Waste can certainly destroy a society, species or most of the ecosphere if, as many point out, we continue with the ridiculous paradigm that we can industrially do multi-generational damage to the life support systems humans depend on and not define this as suicide. It’s almost like our nuclear nuts and oil fetish fucks have morphed us into a mass version of the heaven’s gate cult. Those people thought they could hitch a ride on a comet by commiting suicide. Every single step in industrializaton has, for anyone willing to do the TOTAL math, NOT been ecospherically cost effective. The fact that a small group of humans has temporarily benefited at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humans and all other earthlings right now, not to mention the obvious acceleration in environmental degradation promising a super bleak future, seems to go right over the heads of way to many otherwise intelligent people.

Heaven's Gate Cult Leader that convinced many to commit suicide

Just like the heaven’s gate cult, people are addicted to a dream that never was, PERIOD. All talk about this and that from our youth and how much fun we all had and how nostalgic we are for those nicer times is the exact same phenomenum of a drug addict longing for his first high. LISTEN UP! We are a function of the ecosphere. We DO NOT, despite all the best propaganda efforts of our scientific community, understand the mechanism of the ecosphere sufficently to tinker with it, let alone wantonly pollute it with “externalisms”. EXTERNALISMS!? That’s just some economist bullshit! There are NO externalisms inside the life bubble called the ecosphere; it just takes a while to catch up with you when you mine, bomb and toxify with chemicals NIMBY areas for a few centuries. We are there and yet our scientific community and our financial community and our political wheeler and dealer con-artists with their new techno death toys and ‘miracle’ GMO crops and drug after drug to replace patent expirations, new ripoff scams, more war profiteering and emotional button pushing divide and conquer racist crap just DO NOT GET IT (or maybe they do get it and are insanely trying to make hay out of it).

The people in charge of our dysfunctional clusterfuck are akin to that psycho Whiteapple that led the heaven’s gate cult. They will not change to a sustainable paradigm because THAT requires subordination to the reality that we are a product of the ecosphere and the humble acceptance that we do not understand it yet so, until we do, we must henceforth emulate natural processes of cradle to grave recycling in all industrial technology and outlaw destructive activities like war or perish. No, they prefer to insanely reduce the world population by environmental collapse in the ridiculous la-la land elite hope that then the ecosphere will cure itself and they can continue their merry resource extraction paradigm as if nothing happened. It won’t work because these reductionist morons in power with their scientific priesthood of techno nut balls are so full of pride from all their tremendous ‘contributions’ over the last two centuries that they cannot see the monstrous downside of the technology explosion and that, yes, technology can be developed and used in an environmentally friendly manner. They don’t want to do the work. They are supremely irresponsible and supremely greedy and incredibly stupid.

Instead of doing a rethink, they are just flooring the accelerator and increasing their propaganda blitz.

I am not against technology. Since about 1970 we have had the knowledge to use technology to produce an environmentally friendly and sustainable society free of poisons in food and industry in the scientific literature. It has been deliberately supressed time and time again. Imagine what it cost to cover the country with roads and power lines. Well, decentralized power, food and transportation would cost a hell of a lot less. It’s total bullshit that we can’t do this or that we are ‘hooked’ on oil or nuclear or natural gas. We could have switched away decades ago. In the 70s NASA used solar panels to bring electricity to a Navajo community which was not served by the local electric utilities in a southwestern state. It worked great and the utilities went ballistic. They wrote to NASA requesting the solar panel project be stopped because, even though those areas targeted by NASA were not adequately served by the utilities, the fossil fuel free energy would ‘force’ the utilities to lower their rates. NASA stopped the project.

The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy. What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis among the 1%. But suppose we could dispense with all the agenda laced perjorative propaganda about renewables, agree to clean up the planet and eliminate fossil fuel, nuclear and any other kind of poisonous technology because we have no other choice?

Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? Probably not. I just heard today (June 11, 2012) on the Thom Hartmann show that phytoplankton replacement in a bay in Maine has dropped 500% over a period of a decade or so. The phenomenum has now been confirmed as occurring globally. Phytoplankton produce approximately 50% of the oxygen on this planet through photosynthesis. They are not regenerating adequately because increased ppm of CO2 (now 400 ppm) is acidifying the oceans and killing them. Can the elite be so insane that they plan to meter our oxygen? I hope not. At any rate, we must accept that the fossil fuel economy is not an exercise in fun conveniences or a requirement to maintain ‘civilization’; it’s killing our oxygen supply now as well. We must switch to renewables.

In regard to available energy to maintain some level of ‘civilization’ with renewables, when I mentioned the world evaporation energy example, I wasn’t alluding to energy collection through hydroelectric power (although dams certainly help as long as salmon runs aren’t thwarted), but using this vast amount of energy available free to shed light on the scientifically bankrupt view of quantifying energy by using bomb calorimeters like we did in college and energy mass per mole in rapid oxidation. Nature has never done it that way. Everything in our culture always wants to scale up a process or else judge it as wanting. That is assbackwards from a sustainable biological process point of view. In our bodies, the reason we have enzymes lowering the energy of activation in myriad chemical reactions occurring per second is to keep us from overheating and/or rapid ph changes that would kill us but the fact is that the enzymes accomplish a task with less energy than a straight forward math computation of the chemical reaction energy requires.

Capillary processes in us are unconcerned with “stream head'” like scientists or engineers are when they want to build a dam yet they work just fine manipulating Bernoulli forces to use the absolute minimum energy needed to move that blood so the heart pump doesn’t have to work as hard against vessel friction and pressure changes. In our techno-love affair, everything we do is geared to centralized and maximum power. For example we really do not need a lot of stream head to power a house because we can gradually pump water up to a reservoir in our house to give us electricity on demand. But the techno math says you need X amount of head for Y amount of kilowatts. That’s only true if you need all of that all the time. Sure, not everyone lives by a river or a stream but that is simply a small example. A giant Sequoia pumps over one hundred gallons of water hundreds of feet up every day through transpiration. The tracheal elements can stretch water molecules 27 atmospheres as long as the vacuum holds. The technology to make artificial tree water pumps has been around for decades but our society is STUCK on the energy density per mole fixation like a teenager that wants a hot car to ride to school instead of a small electric rechargable scooter.

Have you heard about the roaring forties?

That’s an area of latitude in the oceans of the southern hemisphere that is always turbulent. They alone could power the world’s energy demands after a ten year installation of wave and undersea current power collection systems that are already being deployed off of England and Scotland. In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenance of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenance option).

At present, ocean oil rigs (which are mostly metal) have sacrificial anodes placed on them so electrolysis in most areas is thwarted. The anodes are replaced as they are used up. And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit.

It’s telling that Einstein described the photoelectric effect at the very beginning of the 20th century but the US government has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to develop solar panels (we only did it when we needed them in space) but it spent a fortune on the development of the bomb in the 30s while a large part of our populace was going hungry.

Have you ever wondered why the oil lobby never attacks nuclear power but spares no expense to demonize renewables with disingenuous propaganda and mendacity? Think about that a while. If you come to the conclusion that the nuclear power plants were put out there to make bomb material and get you to pay for it and were never, ever considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels for the production of electricity or a serious source of oil lobby competition, you win the prize.

There is also no excuse whatsoever for not using solar and electric power to run every single ship in the ocean. It would be child’s play to switch all automobiles and trucks to full electric as long we had geothermal, wind, tide and ocean current derived power 24/7, not to mention solar panels.

Do you know what oil tankers do after they offload the oil? They fill huge portions of the holds with sea water (for ballast) and then dump it when they get back to reload with oil. This massive pollution goes on day in and day out. We have a guaranteed continuous oil spill as long as we have a fossil fuel ocean tanker economy.

As for fertilizers and food production machinery requiring a massive amount of fossil fuels to feed 7 billlion humans, the fact is that using decentralized permaculture with humanure (after appropriate and low tech local processing to avoid disease pathogens) along with greenhouse technology for nordic climates can replace the fossil fuel required to run tractors, make fertilizer and insecticides and herbicides.

I mention farm machinery because there is increasing evidence that plowing needs to be replaced by non-plowing with perennial crops in order to stop the massive top soil loss and lowered nutrition of crop yield (they look the same but don’t have the same nutritional content). Other posters here are up on humanure and they are right. I recommend anyone repulsed by this to think again. Feces are an inseparable part of being human and it’s high time we stopped with this Victorian idiocy of seeing it as bad stuff; it’s part of our salvation as a species. An added plus with humanure through the avoidance of chemical fertilizers is no more ocean dead zones and massive top soil degradation. Also the energy and water savings in not pumping human waste to be treated with chemicals (made with fossil fuels) in a sewage treatment plant would save billons of dollars.

“The strategic goal of biofuel is to supplement or even replace fossil fuels, the amount of which is constantly and rapidly diminishing.” haitireconstruction.ning.com/page/biofuel-1

I’ve already mentioned my views on the population explosion and its causes but I wish to point out how the oil lobby has tried to make fossil fuel brownie points out of it.

Remember the green revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s that supposedly caused the population explosion? The numbers are in. The yields are not statistically different with all the fossil fuel fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides than without them. The green revolution is a lie fostered by, you guessed it, the fossil fuel lobby.

Their only valid claim is the fuel for machinery which now turns out to lower crop nutrition from top soil plowing degradation. This degradation is caused by a combination of chemical fertilizers and plowing (bare soil tends to blow away when dry or erode when wet) which leaches the soil of trace minerals needed to produce nutritious and tasty as opposed to bland crops. The way things stand right now, agricultural guidelines in the U.S. state that it’s okay to lose 4 tons of top soil per acre per year from ‘modern’ farming techniques. The government claims it is the price we pay for high ‘yields’. Are you comfortable with that? I’m not. Considering top soil regeneration takes over 100 years, I cannot believe we are doing anything but losing massive amounts every year.

And last but not least, the militaries of the world are the most voracious users of fossil fuel. We sure as hell do not need them to keep 7 billion fed and clothed. The U.S. Navy, in particular, has the top spot as fossil fuel user AND polluter.

We need gradual, decentralized trickle charge or slow pumping energy storage systems for sustainable humanity. Anything else is not viable for the planet. If we want to zip around at high speed and be able to have instant this and that, yes we have an energy crisis. If we want to emulate biological processes and eschew the love affair with higher energy density per mole of fossil and or nuclear poisons killing the planet, we don’t have an energy crisis.

Nature paces everything; so should we.

All that said, there is the 1% with their hubris and arrogance and there is the rest of humanity. The agenda of the 1% is a tad different from the rest of us. I agree the knockdown is coming. The people controlling the levers of innovation and adaptation in our governments and the elite parasites that own them want this knockdown so it will come. I maintain that the false notion of a causal relationship between a large population and a polluted, unsustainable, fossil fuel dependent human society is the driving force behind this elite desire for a knockdown. The elites are the only truly unsustainable population on this earth because of their mega-carbon footprints.

So, in true Wall Street Orwellian fashion, they blame the bulk of the 7 billion humans for THEIR piggery and slavish dependency on fossil fuels. The 1% that owns our governments loves the predatory resource extraction paradigm despite the fact that some of them probably suspect that it will cause a population knockdown, not from lack of fossil fuels, but from environmental collapse. Billions of humans dying is considered a good thing by the 1%. They think it will solve the world’s environmental problems and provide a more manageable population of slaves. The 1% probably grumble about minimum gene pool diversity species population required in order to perpetuate homo sapiens. The 1% think robots will take care of all the ‘important’ work while medical technology available to the 1% will provide them with 150 year plus lifetimes. They are wrong and they are the cancer that is destroying humanity.

There’s a way to clean up this world and live sustainably. Killing off several billion is a straw man. It’s typical elite bullshit adding two an two and getting whatever answer keeps them in the catbird seat. The media will continue to block the truth from the people 24/7.

I apologize if I tried to cover too much ground here but this situation we are in has matured for well over a century and we need to see how we got here to understand, if we survive, how to prevent a new set of snakes from selling us snake oil in the future.

Feel free to pass all or any part of this rant with or without attribution.

Everything I wrote can be researched free on the internet if you want to post links about horse plagues, NASA correspondence with utilities, Henry Ford and hemp plastic, Rockefeller chicanery, U.S. solar panel development reasons, Americans starving while the bomb was being developed, Bernays propaganda tools, etc.

Posted by: AGelbert

Agelbert NOTE: Isn't it just AMAZING how now it is "mankind" in general, and not the Fossil Fuel 🦕🦖 Crooks and Liars IN PARTICULAR, that created one of the biggest environmental disasters in history? Sure, Yeah, we are "all guilty".

Read about the horrendous habitat destroying effects that continue to degrade the ocean environment in the Gulf of Mexico PLUS harm the flora and fauna in the USA and Mexican land areas. That oil dispersant Corexit ☠️ POISON that Halliburton was paid for, which FURTHER polluted the Gulf on the U.S. taxpayer dime, added MORE grievous harm to numerous species.

The Hydrocarbon Hustlers are destroying this planet's biosphere for short term profit. We stop burning hydrocarbons or we are all dead, PERIOD.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was 8 years ago. The ocean is still struggling to recover

LAST UPDATED ON JULY 3RD, 2018 AT 3:36 PM BY MIHAI ANDREI

Eight years ago, mankind created one of the biggest environmental disasters in history. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill led to the discharge of 4.9 million barrels (210 million US gal; 780,000 m3) of oil, and nature still hasn’t recovered, a new study has found.

Oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill approaching the coast of Mobile, Alabama, on May 6, 2010. (at article link)

The spill area hosts 8,332 species, all of which are threatened by the hydrocarbon leaks. A 2014 study of the effects of the oil spill on bluefin tuna found that toxins from oil spills can cause irregular heartbeats leading to cardiac arrest. A further study also found that the toxins could severely damage the internal organs of predators and even humans in the area — directly contradicting BP, the oil company responsible for the spill.

To make matters even worse, the oil dispersant Corexit, previously only used as a surface application, was released underwater in unprecedented amounts. The goal was to make oil more easily biodegradable, but the plan backfired as the oil and dispersant mixture permeated the food chain through zooplankton — from which it proceeded to spread across the entire ecosystem. Chemicals from the spill were found in migratory birds as far away as Minnesota, with a devastating effect on marine wildlife. A 2016 study reported that 88% of 360 baby or stillborn dolphins within the spill area “had abnormal or underdeveloped lungs”, compared to 15% in other areas.

No matter where and how you look, the scale of the disaster is shocking. Alas, it gets even worse: new study found that the basic building blocks of life in the ocean have been altered, indicating that the ocean still hasn’t recovered from the oil spill.

“At the sites closest to the spill, biodiversity was flattened,” study lead author and University of Southern Mississippi microbial ecologist Leila Hamdan told The Guardian. “There were fewer types of microbes. This is a cold, dark environment and anything you put down there will be longer lasting than oil on a beach in Florida. It’s premature to imagine that all the effects of the spill are over and remediated,” she said.

Researchers took sediment samples from shipwrecks scattered up to 150 km (93 miles) from the spill site to study how and if micro-biodiversity has recovered. Shipwrecks are biodiversity hotspots, so it’s a good place to see how life recovered. Researchers wrote:

“More than 2,000 historic shipwrecks spanning 500 years of history, rest on the Gulf of Mexico seafloor. Shipwrecks serve as artificial reefs and hotspots of biodiversity by providing hard substrate, something rare in deep ocean regions. The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) spill discharged crude oil into the deep Gulf. Because of physical, biological, and chemical interactions, DWH oil was deposited on the seafloor, where historic shipwrecks are present. This study examined sediment microbiomes at seven historic shipwrecks.”

Results weren’t encouraging. Microbes are still struggling to recover, and since they are affected, the entire food chain that’s built upon them is also affected. There’s a good chance we have still yet to see all the far-reaching consequences of this event.

“We rely heavily on the ocean and we could be looking at potential effects to the food supply down the road,” she said. “Deep sea microbes regulate carbon in the atmosphere and recycle nutrients. I’m concerned there will be larger consequences from this sort of event.”

The timing of the study is also very fitting — it comes just as a new measure by the Trump 🦀 administration opens up 90% of U.S. coasts to offshore oil drilling,dismantling ocean conservation measures put in place by former president Barack Obama in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon calamity. This means that this type of disaster will become much more likely in the future, much to the chagrin of scientists and conservationists.

Posted by: AGelbert

Agelbert NOTE: Ground-Level Ozone is another Hydrocarbon Hell "gift", compliments of the profit over planet fossil fuel fascist WELFARE QUEENS, who champion the suicidally stupid continued use of hydrocarbons to power human civilization. 🤬

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What Causes Ground-level ozone is caused when the sun reacts with pollutants from cars and industrial plants to form ozone at or near the surface of the earth.

The sunny weather you enjoy in many parts of the world may, unfortunately, be increasing the chances of the formation of ground-level ozone.

Summertime is especially dangerous in many traditionally sunny areas, especially those areas with large populations. The EPA issues warnings and advisories for five major air pollutants.

Vermont is NOT a traditionally sunny area. However, thanks to the Hydrocarbon Hustlers🐉🦕🦖, who are DIRECTLY responsible for each and every one of the red flagged items listed above, we are getting MOREOZONE hazard alerts.

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🚩 Air Quality Alert

1131 AM EDT Mon Jul 2 2018

🚩...Air quality alert in effect from 2 PM to 10 PM Monday...

The Vermont Agency of Natural Resources has issued an air quality action day for all of Vermont today.

This afternoon and evening hours, levels of ozone may register in the `unhealthy for sensitive groups` (USG), range across Vermont. Note that elevated ozone concentrations will only occur later in the day or evening in Northern Vermont. Ozone will be transported from the Atlantic Coast urban corridor region to New England as a southerly wind develops in the region, and very hot conditions continue.

Note that ozone concentrations are predicted with the Air Quality Index (AQI), scale. The Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups AQI is 101 to 150. Although general public is not likely to be affected at this AQI range, people with lung disease, older adults and children are at a greater risk from exposure to ozone.

Posted by: AGelbert

I have mentioned here many times and still remained puzzled at this Christmas tree game. What a horrible waste of beautiful greenery for so little in my view. At least if you were building something viable with it one could make sense of it but to stick it in a room for a few weeks and throw it away seems so absurd to me. The transportation and fuel waste of hauling these beautiful trees from Canada and Maine or whatever is another terrible wast IMO.

Agreed. It might have been one thing when you went up the hill and brought back a likely sapling. When you consider that entire business is exist to cultivate these trees, cut them and ship them, and then waste them within a period of weeks incredibly wasteful. Especially at scale.

If the problem was limited to the unjustified harvest of blue spruce and other conifers for Christmas Trees 🎄, that waste, though inexcusable, would still not constitute much of a threat to our environment.

The problem is orders of magnitude bigger than that. You can check how many acres of trees any state lost at the links below.

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“Urban forests are an important resource,” says co-author Dave Nowak from the USDA Forest Service’s Northern Research Station. “Urban foresters, planners and decision-makers need to understand trends in urban forests so they can develop and maintain sufficient levels of tree cover – and the accompanying forest benefits – for current and future generations of citizens.”A table showing tree cover 🌳 and impervious coverchange by state is available here. And you can download the whole study here.

Posted by: AGelbert

The USDA Forest Service reveals that cities and communities are losing 175,000 acres of tree cover annually, while pavement, roads, and buildings are increasing.

Trees that grace cities and other residential areas are truly a treasure. Not only do they provide habitat for non-human city creatures, but they offer all kinds of health benefits to us human animals as well. And aside from the boosts of wellness they so generously proffer, the annual benefits of U.S. urban forests in considering air pollution removal, carbon sequestration, and decreased building energy use and the subsequent altered power plant emissions are estimated at $18 billion.

So you'd think that city planners and local governments would be all gung-ho about trees, right? But alas, the trees appear to be losing. Research from scientists with the USDA Forest Service estimate that between 2009 and 2014, tree cover in the country's urban and community areas declined each year by 36 million trees, or around 175,000 acres of tree cover.

Meanwhile, pavement and other impervious cover (like roads and buildings) increased at a rate of about 167,000 acres a year during the same period. Cue the Joni Mitchell.

"Nationally, urban/community tree cover declined from 42.9 percent to 42.2 percent. Twenty-three states had a statistically significant decrease in tree cover, with a total of 45 states showing a net decline," notes a statement for the research. "Trees improve air and water quality, reduce summer energy costs by cooling homes, reduce noise, mitigate runoff and flooding, and enhance human health and well-being, making them important to human health and urban and community infrastructure."

States or districts that have lost the greatest net percentage in urban/community tree cover were Rhode Island, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Alabama and Nebraska. Meanwhile, states with the greatest annual net loss in tree cover acreage were Georgia with 18,830 acres lost year, Florida with 18,060 acres and Alabama with 12,890 acres.

Mississippi, Montana and New Mexico fared slightly better with (albeit non-significant) increases in urban/community tree cover. Of all the states, Maine has the highest percentage in urban/community areas with 68 percent tree cover. At the other end, North Dakota ranked as having the lowest amount of urban/community tree cover with a mere 10 percent. (Note that grassland states like North Dakota historically only have trees along rivers – as was pointed out to me by a biologist on Twitter – which could account for lower percentages among those states' urban areas as well.)

“Urban forests are an important resource,” says co-author Dave Nowak from the USDA Forest Service’s Northern Research Station. “Urban foresters, planners and decision-makers need to understand trends in urban forests so they can develop and maintain sufficient levels of tree cover – and the accompanying forest benefits – for current and future generations of citizens.”A table showing tree cover 🌳 and impervious coverchange by state is available here. And you can download the whole study here.

Posted by: AGelbert

Tropical forests lost an area the size of Bangladesh worldwide in 2017--the second-worst year of tree loss on record after 2016, according to new data from the World Resources Institute.

The WRI analysis, which uses satellite data to survey forest cover worldwide, finds that the rate of deforestation amounts to 40 football fields worth of trees disappearing each minute. "We simply won’t meet the climate targets that we agreed to in Paris without a drastic reduction in tropical deforestation and restoration of forests around the world," Andreas Dahl-Jorgensen, deputy director of the Norwegian government’s International Climate and Forest Initiative, told the New York Times.

Posted by: AGelbert

Every 10 years? How many 10 year periods has that trend been measured over? 3. Hardly enough to establish a trend exists.

These dead zones are caused by the fertiliser run-off from farms and by sewerage outlets (that is, by YOU). Time for YOU to DO SOMETHING.Fortunately the oceans are VERY BIG and the impact of dead zones is TINY %agewise.

Agelbert NOTE: Watch Palloy try the "it's a big world and this is just a tiny, tiny pollution drop in the bucket" TRICK that all Climate Change Deniers/Hydrocarbon Loving BS Artists reach for, like Palloy just did with the Ocean Dead Zone increase article, to try to claim this crude oil pollution in the river is "not significant".

Deniers alway try to isolate each and every article about pollution in a deliberately disingenuos attempt to undermine the massive pollution downside of using hydrocarbons to run our civilization. Palloy is a bit more nuanced in that he makes a show of being pro-environment. For a person that is so "peo-environment" he is alwys trying to make light of hydrocarbon pollution spills or GHG polltuion global warming trends. This gives the lie to his claim to be "pro-environment". Palloy is a specialist in the morally bankrupt, but extremely effective, use of GASLIGHTING.

Thirty-two cars of a Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) train derailed, 14 of which leaked crude oil into the Rock River in Doon, Iowa. The cause of the derailment is unknown, but officials including Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds attributed it to heavy rain Wednesday and Thursday which led to flooding.

To aid recovery from extreme weather and its consequences, including the derailment, Reynolds issued a proclamation of disaster emergency Saturday for Lyon County, where the train derailed, as well as Plymouth, Sioux and Woodbury counties.

The oil spill hit the town of Rock Valley, Iowa, which was coping with its second flood in four years, especially hard.

"Our city administrator said to me, 'The only thing we need now is a plane crash,'" Rock Valley mayor Van Otterloo told the Des Moines Register. "Everything came at once."

Rock Valley acted quickly to shut off water wells following the spill and plans to drain the wells and use rural water until the well water tests safe.

There are also concerns that oil could contaminate drinking water in Omaha, Nebraska, 150 miles downstream, since the Rock River merges with the Big Sioux River, which then feeds into the Missouri. Omaha's Metropolitan Utilities District said they were monitoring water pulled from the Missouri, the Des Moines Register reported. The Metropolitan Utilities District said they could source water from unconnected rivers if needed, according to Reuters.

Reynolds told the Des Moines Register it was still unknown how many communities were affected by the oil spill and how it would impact the surrounding environment.

While none of the initial responses mentioned it, last week's flooding and the resulting derailment could be related to climate change. A pre-Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assessment of climate change impacts in the Midwest found that precipitation and storms were projected to increase this century, and precipitation in some areas had already increased by 20 percent.

Cristi Moore, who lives in a trailer park near Rock Valley on land that was flooded both in 2014 and 2018, didn't mention climate change but had noticed a difference in the severity of recent floods. She told the Des Moines Register that before 2014, her levees would have been high enough to combat the highest flood levels.

Posted by: AGelbert

Agelbert NOTE: These hunter gatherer tribes who, unlike most of us, live in harmony with God's Creation, are being victimized by "civilized" human criminals because of greed. Some tribes are acting as Guardians for the uncontacted tribes.

Survival International is celebrating the good work of these Guardians. I applaud this work.

Unfortunately, this is an ultimately quixotic endeavour. WHY? Because, Catastrophic Climate Change will kill humans in the tropics before it begins to kill them in large numbers in most other places. These hunter gatherer tribes, the most innocent of all human groups responsible for this profit over planet predatory stupidity by the hydrocarbon producing conscience free crooks, are doomed by that hydrocarbon ERoEI COST, left out of most calculations, Catastrophic Climate Change.

At present, that is not the case. At present, millions of humans annually die from breathing the particulates, and from other toxic effects visited on the land and sea, produced by the burning of hydrocarbons ☠️. One of the leading causes of death among humans in poverty stricken areas, where they cannot boil water due to the lack of hydrocarbons, dysentery, is a drop in the death toll bucket ☠️ in comparison.

This is one of the reasons I get so exercised about people so concerned with a collapse from a LACK of hydrocarbons, when many millions MORE are NOW perishing each year from the burning of them.

This inexcusable profit over people and planet death dealing PRESENT irrefutable reality, as sad as it is, does not even address Greenhouse Gas(es) caused Catastrophic Climate Change, which is 100% unavoidable at this point (I will post on the inevitabilityand centuries long duration of the multi-species harm by GHG caused Anthropogenic Global Over-Heating at another time).

I have common ground with Professor Palloy in the respect and admiration I hold for these hunter gatherer tribes. However, for the reasons I just stated above, I do not share his belief that they will survive when most other humans begin to perish from profit over planet stupidity.

There will be no collapse for at least 50 years, if ever, from lack of hydrocarbons to burn. The hydrocarbons will, of course, being a finiteresource of energy, eventually run out, but the corollary that the lack of hydrocarbons to burn will trigger a collapse of civilization is not, at least for a half century or so, a valid assertion.

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Definition of corollary

1 : a proposition inferred immediately from a proved proposition with little or no additional proof

There will continue to be a larger and larger death toll from the PRESENT AVAILABILITY of hydrocarbons that are burned annually. I share with Professor Palloy the duty of all humans to be as frugal as possible and to do all we can to reduce our carbon footprint, not just to zero, but negative.

Our main point of contention is that he believes the greatest threat to human civilization is Peak Hydrocarbons, while claiming that GHG pollution mitigation is of secondary importance. I believe he has that exactly backwards. Prima Facie evidence that I am right and he is wrong is the FACT that many millions more humans annually die from hydrocarbon burning pollution than from the lack of hydrocarbons (e.g. death for dysentery due to not being able to boil water to make it potable). Added evidence supporting my claim is that ZERO plants and animals, from microscopic to macroscopic, perish from the LACK of hydrocrabons we stupid humans burn. Sure, life and death is part of nature. They die from lots of causes in the natural course of events. BUT, hydrocarbon pollution PLUS Global Warming IS killing them off even more wantonly than the particulates pollution from hydrocarbon burning is killing humans! As Catastrophic climate Change gathers velocity, more and more biosphere fauna and flora will be destroyed by "natural" disasters that would NOT have taken place if we had not overheated the atmosphere.

There is just no excuse for continuing this charade of placing biosphere degrading hydrocarbon use in a privileged, civilization "protecting", position.

The world needs hydrocarbons like a dog needs ticks. I'm sure the tribes in the following articles agree wholeheartedly.

June 25, 2018

Exclusive! Catch a glimpse of an uncontacted tribe.

These photos, also taken by the Guardians of the Amazon🕊, show an old camp site that was once the home of the uncontacted people in the video. They’re hunter-gatherers, often on the move, and these small huts are their homes. The shelters, called tapiris, are constructed quickly and skilfully from branches and palm leaves. The bundle is a homemade lunchbox for carrying their food around with them. Societies such as this are the most eco-friendly and sustainable on Earth.

This astonishing footage was passed to us by the Guardians of the Amazon🕊. It was captured by chance, and shows a close encounter with uncontacted Awá Indians. The forests around are swarming with loggers 👹and any encounter is likely to be fatal for the Awá.That is why it's so important for us to show this footage; it proves there are uncontacted people living in this forest and so the loggers must be kept out at all costs.

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We’re excited to share some good news stories with you!

The Guardians of the Amazon🕊 are a brave group of men from the Guajarara tribe who are working tirelessly to defend the territory they share with uncontacted neighbors from illegal loggers.

The Guardians are struggling alone against violent logging mafias with very little support from the Brazilian government. We used your donations and your emails to put pressure on Brazil to act. It worked! A few weeks ago, environmental police finally showed up to help the Guardians kick loggers out of their territory. Though the police didn't stay long, and the Guardians are still in grave need of more support from the authorities, this goes to show that together we can make a real difference.

The Guardians are re-energized and inspired by this intervention: “Thank you for helping us with our fight, and with the situation we are facing here now…It was thanks to you and your pressure that the back-up appeared here at our village. So, thank you once more. We are fighting for what is ours. We're in this together."

But that’s not all. A few years ago, Survival supporters fought hard to persuade the government to remove loggers from the uncontacted Awá tribe’s territory. We succeeded, and now we’re pleased to announce that one of the loggers’ ring-leaders is being brought to justice. It’s extremely rare for cases like this ever to reach trial, so this is real cause for celebration – and proof that persistent campaigning pays off.

These are two rays of hope in an increasingly anti-indigenous climate in Brazil which is allowing illegal logging of tribal peoples’ forests to flourish. Although we’re encouraged and spurred on by these successes, our work in this area is very far from over. Driven by ruthless greed, the loggers just keep coming – and they won’t give up easily…

With your help, neither will we. We have to keep piling on the pressure and pushing harder and harder to ensure the loggers stay out forever. And any help you can give us to do this will be hugely appreciated. Don't forget, one of the most useful things you can do is help spread the word about our vital work. Please share our posts on social media and take every opportunity to talk about the global movement for tribal peoples.

Thank you once again for being a part of these successes. We look forward to sharing many more with you in the future.

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